Author Archives: Zeus Kerravala

We’ve probably all used the phrase “too much of anything is a bad thing.” Too much ice cream makes you fat, too many cats and you get called crazy, and too much NFL football on Sunday gets you banned to the doghouse by your wife. 

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In IT, too much network traffic is certainly a bad thing. We need networks and rely on them to access cloud applications, call people on via videoconferencing and do a whole bunch of other tasks. However, too much traffic and the network becomes unusable and a source of frustration for workers. 

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The digital business era has brought with it a number of new tools and technologies, such as software-defined networking (SDN), Internet of Things (IoT), mobility and the cloud. These innovations enable businesses to increase their level of dynamism and be more distributed, but they also increase the complexity of securing the business. Old-school security methods and tools do not work in an environment where the perimeter is eroding and resources are becoming more virtual and cloud-centric.

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To combat this, security professionals have embraced the concept of segmentation. The number of segmentation providers has exploded over the past few years, including VMware repositioning its NSX network virtualization product as a micro-segmentation solution. 

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A decade ago, security meant a big firewall at a single ingress point.  All devices and applications were under IT’s tight control, so they did not create significant security risks. 

 Today, everything has changed.  The rise of cloud computing, BYOD, shadow IT, WiFi devices, software defined everything and other trends have blown up the tightly controlled model and created a rather chaotic system. 

Adding to the challenge is that attackers are getting smarter and targeting IoT systems and end users directly, which often bypasses the security technology.  This is why some security experts say there are two types of organizations, those that have been breached and know about it and those that have been breached and don’t know about it. 

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Last week the Enterprise Connect trade show was held in Orlando, Florida. The show is the collaboration industry’s largest event and because of that, there were dozens of vendors that issued press releases touting the latest and greatest innovations in the market.

One announcement that I thought flew under the radar was Cisco’s intent to acquire privately held Synata. Jim Duffy wrote a short article covering the news but the importance of this acquisition hasn’t been discussed.

Explaining what Syanta does is fairly simple. It lets user search encrypted files and messages, even if they’re stored in cloud storage drives. Cisco will use this technology to enhance its team-messaging product, Cisco Spark.

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